Slow Food’s slow decline

You may have seen recent headlines and wondered what’s up with Slow Food USA.

In one word: drama.

Background: Slow Food International, the parent organization of the USA chapter, was founded in 1986 in Italy to preserve biodiversity and traditional foods. Chapters have popped up all over the world in opposition to fast food. It’s been criticized in the US as an elitist, locavore organization that is too costly for low income Americans.

And so begins the controversy. In an effort to appeal to a younger, less affluent population, the Slow Food USA issued a ‘$5 challenge’ in August of 2011: participants were instructed to create meals for $5 per person or less. Obviously, this challenge was to prove that for the same cost as a value meal, anyone could eat local, sustainably grown food.

The first president of Slow Food USA, Josh Viertel, publicly stated that he’s proud that the organization was trying to focus on food justice and making healthy food affordable. In June however, he was asked to step down. Actually, technically, he resigned.

Slow Food USA apparently disagrees with this notion of food justice. The organization believes that people should be willing to spend (proportionally) more money on food to ensure that farmers are paid a fair wage. I get it and I agree – Americans are spending less of their income on food than any other country and we have our waistlines to show for it.

Of course, many of us agree that farmers should be paid a fair, livable wage and that food should not be cheap and nutritionally empty. However, if Slow Food’s argument is that not everyone can afford to eat local, sustainable food then it seems an air of elitism does exist. Interestingly, Slow Food just received a grant from the Kellogg foundation for $1.2 million toward improving the diets of lower income Americans. So, what exactly is their stance?!

Though I’m a Slow Food supporter and agree with their mission, I think it’s important to balance affordability and sustainability. Food justice should be ensuring that farmers are paid a fair wage and that healthy, sustainably grown food is affordable.

Though Slow Food’s efforts have sent mixed messages, one thing is evident: as long as there are subsidized commodity crops, fruits and vegetables will always be more expensive. Let’s make that our focus.

One Comment to "Slow Food’s slow decline"

The problem is definitely not with slow food, they have a clear direction all over the world.

I can see that one problem is the obsession with cheap dominant over there. It seems that in the US people are addicted to consumption, want to buy cheap to buy more and more. The problem is the urgent need of more political action toward changes in US subsidies to start with…

Those subsidies are behind the cheap junkie stuff, that looks like food and cost like nothing, and after eating cheap crap people just forgot how hard and costly it is to produce real food.

That is why Doha Round failed, USA (and a bunch of other Europeans) refused to end illegal agro subsidies which threatens to break local agriculture systems all over the world and after that they come dumping their cheap GMO grains all over the place… so, not very simple to just blame Slow Food…